(Just realized that for some reason, Mutt keeps sending emails to the user rather than the mailing list.) 1. If you mean "free" as in "gratis", then yes. Both free as in libre and proprietary as in, well, proprietary are available free of charge in the repositories, although the AUR might include shareware from time to time. And with the exception of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, nobody in the GNU/Linux world is going to make you pay for the operating system, which wouldn't even make sense, because you can usually as well just get the more superior upstream distro for free, which again with the exception of RHEL, all independent distro's are. 2. As I said earlier, the GNU link I sent you last time has all the answers. After all, Richard Stallman has been fighting for software freedom since 1985, which is probably before most of us are even born. But to explain in a brief concept, when comparing free vs proprietary software, nobody cares whether it's paid or not, you can have paid free software, and free of charge proprietary software. This is just a misconception due to how the English language works, where freedom and free of charge are bundled into 1 word, which results in rather awkward moments when westerners decide to use Google Translate to know what "free" is in Japanese, they get "無料" (no cost), and put this as a tatoo. The actual word they meant is "自由" (freedom), btw. Communist millenials and zoomers take advantage of this misconception, which makes it even funnier. What it means is rather: Freedom 0: The freedom to use the program for any purpose. Freedom 1: The freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish. Freedom 2: The freedom to redistribute and make copies so you can help your neighbor. Freedom 3: The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits. So to simplify, free software means the user has full control over the software, is able to fix problems themselves without having to harrass technical support for every tiny problem, and can copy, modify, and share the code without fearing any legal consequences. Or even simpler: free software means that the user controls the program, not the other way around. Some real world examples of programs controlling the user: * Windows 11 gets updated, which performs a complete re-install of the OS, whether the user likes it or not. Better yet, the user can no longer use the PC they have bought unless they create a Microsoft account. * Steam decided to force Windows users to downgrade from Windows 7 to 10 or 11, or get their entire game library which they have paid for taken away from them. * Apple decides to artificially boost battery usage of older iPhone models via OTA updates to force you into buying the latest model. On 2023年07月12日 17:59, Source Code wrote: > Hello, I wanted to clarify something else: > 1. I understand Arch Linux is absolutely free? And all the proprietary > programs that are related to Arch Linux are also free, and I don't have to > pay for them, right? > 2. Proprietary programs are associated with programming or anything else > that I can download, they may already differ in license (be paid or free), > right?
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